


Red Dust

by holdouttrout



Category: Alias
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-05
Updated: 2012-11-05
Packaged: 2017-11-18 00:31:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/554908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/holdouttrout/pseuds/holdouttrout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short piece about Nadia's reaction to the events surrounding her new life. Combines What I Think, Crumbling Promises, and Red Dust.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red Dust

It's crazy.

 

There's no other way to look at what has happened these last few months. My life was always insane, even before I knew anything about myself or my family. I think, sometimes, that I was most normal when I was living on the streets. At least then I fit somewhere, in some made-up category. I was anonymous street kid, no number, because I wasn't worth it. I wasn't special, wasn't The Passenger, wasn't the daughter of a famous criminal.

I didn't have a father.

I didn't think about it back then. I missed Elena—she was my guide and, I thought, my friend. I thought she might care about me, miss me, disapprove of my new life. I never once suspected the truth.

I look back at my time in the orphanage, and I shudder to think she was with me the whole time. Watching me. Knowing more about me and not telling me. Using me.

Even now, I think it's ridiculous. A story they made up, to brainwash me or to confuse me. A story made up to try to use me, to turn me against her. If I didn't know Sydney, I might believe it.

Sydney. I know she's good at lying, at convincing others she's telling the truth. I've seen her work. I've worked with her. I've even seen her lie to my face, and I know I believed it then. For all I know she could be lying to me every time she tells me anything.

And yet, somehow I believe her. And somehow that makes me doubt the craziness of the whole thing. Of course it's impossible I'm the reincarnation of Rambaldi, but there's Sydney, who believes some of it. Of course it's impossible for a CIA agent to act on her own to prove her sister's father's innocence, but she does it. Of course it's impossible to have our sort of history and still function rationally and well, but Sydney walks into work every day and works with the man who ruined her life several times.

That's what I think of every time the facts become absurd. Because otherwise I'm crazy. Because otherwise I have nothing to believe.

*_*_*_*_*

 

I did not see at first what she saw in him. He was good-looking, of course, but I knew what he had done, done to her, and I knew I would not have been able to look past it. He did not impress me.

 

He seemed cold, and distant. It seemed like he calculated every glance, every move, every touch.

I could not see past his—I do not know what to call it. It was like a window, and he only opened the shutters enough to let some of his life out. He was entirely unlike Weiss, who never hid anything from me. I wonder if Weiss knew how charming that openness was in my world. Probably.

After that first mission, I saw Sydney start to fall.

Piece by piece her promises to herself, muttered in the evenings over tequila and ice cream, broke.  _I won't let him in the door for a couple of months. I won't kiss him for at least six. I won't sleep with_ —and here she would actually blush.

I could not understand it. I know how strong she is. How did it happen? How did he get in so fast?

I got a glimpse the day we came back from a mission. Sydney was radiantly happy, in a way I'd just realized came only from a successful mission. He met us at the gate. When he saw her, all the walls came down and he grinned back at her. It was only a moment, but I saw all the love and the hurt and the laughter and the caution that they had had to grow over the last few years. And I realized that he was only like that around her—only her, when no one else was there, or when no one else mattered. Like at the gate.

And in the face of that utter honesty, it was easy to see how her promises could crumble.

*_*_*_*_*

 

_I will kill you._

These words rip through my head, leaving a trail of dust behind them. The dust settles into my eyes, the remnants of my constant rage.

My eyes are closed. They have been bolted shut by drugs. If I could open them, the dust would seep out, and I would kill my captors with one look. If that didn't succeed, my hands would finish the job in seconds.

A wash of blue, and I am almost myself again. A new treatment, then, quizas, but I can already tell this one will fail, just like the others.

The first rush of calm carries me to the lake, where voices echo out to me, bouncing their way into my brain, almost comprehensible, teasing me with familiarity.

I catch one—Jack—then another—unfamiliar—then Sydney.

Sydney. She's speaking to them, then to me. The echoes make her voice hard to catch, but I manage to get to some of the words, sometimes having to dive down in between sentences for the ones I missed. I put them together after she leaves or stops talking.

"…miss you."

"Still looking…Sloane…out of prison."

"Weiss…gone."

These are my conversations: whole hours distilled into a few words.

And I don't even have time to think about how I feel about these words, in that order, before I am dragged out of the lake where the words float, into the caves where red dust crawls along my skin, through my brain, and into my eyes.


End file.
